Older workers in Central New York have a much harder time finding a job after being laid off

View full sizeFrank Ordonez / The Post-StandardKeith Chatterton officiates a girls intermediate field hockey game between Cazenovia and East Syracuse last month. Chatterton, 61, was laid off on Nov. 5, 2008. With the exception of a four-month stint last winter as a construction site manager, he hasn't worked since.

Syracuse, NY -- Keith Chatterton walks his golden retriever around his Syracuse neighborhood every morning, watching wistfully as his neighbors head off to jobs. Going to work is something he hasn’t done on a steady basis for three years.

Chatterton, now 61, was selling metal building components across four states when he was laid off by his Houston-based company, MBCI, on Nov. 5, 2008 — the day after Barack Obama was elected president. With the exception of a four-month stint last winter as a construction site manager, a job that a friend set up for him, he hasn’t worked since.

Instead, he has spent his days scouring the Internet for openings, attending job fairs and support groups, trying to widen his network of contacts and sending out thousands of electronic resumes. If he gets any responses at all, he said, they’re “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

“Lately, I’ve gotten to the point that I have to face the very real possibility that I may not ever find another job,” he said.

His $75,000 salary is gone, he has flown past his 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, and his 401(k) continues to be battered in the stock market. If not for his wife’s $35,000-a-year job at the Syracuse Housing Authority, he said, they wouldn’t be able to hold on to their three-bedroom house near Corcoran High School.

Like millions of middle-aged workers left jobless in the Great Recession, Chatterton finds himself paring expenses to the bone — “just existing,” he said — and facing the prospect of a greatly diminished retirement. “I don’t know that I have a retirement,” he said with a rueful laugh. “I’ll have to find something I can do to generate some money until I drop dead. That’s the long and short of it: work till I die.”

While unemployment is lower among older workers, it is much harder for those older than 45 to find a job. In September, the average unemployed worker had been out of work for 41 weeks — the longest average in at least 60 years. But for older workers, the numbers were even higher — a full year for those between 45 and 54, and nearly 55 weeks for those 55 to 64.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t calculate unemployment numbers by age at the local level. But extrapolating from state numbers suggests there are more than 8,000 jobless workers in Central New York age 45 or older.

The recession officially ended in June 2009, but it’s fair to say the average American family hasn’t noticed. Even people who found work after losing their jobs during the recession continue to struggle, making nearly 18 percent less than they did before, Princeton economist Henry S. Farber reported recently.

In the two years after the recession ended, median household income fell by 6.7 percent — more than twice as much as it did during the recession itself, according to a study by Gordon Green and John Coder of Sentier Research. With the recession and its aftermath combined, inflation-adjusted household income has fallen by 9.8 percent.

“A decline of this magnitude represents a significant reduction in the American standard of living,” Green and Coder reported.

The downturn has created problems for all age groups, but for laid-off older workers, the impact is often much greater: They have been tossed out of work in what for many were their peak earning years. And as they approached retirement, they have watched as their pensions and 401(k)s have been ravaged by Wall Street.

Just drinking water

Jeff Baldigo understands that. The 53-year-old Clay resident has been laid off three times during his 27-year career — all a result of company mergers, restructuring or takeovers.

After graduating from Clarkson University with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and business law, he worked in finance, planning and marketing at General Electric Co., Martin Marietta Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and a few smaller firms before his most recent layoff, from Delta Square Inc., a Rochester-based seller of technology products, in July 2010.

After his earlier layoffs, he quickly found another job. But for the past 16 months, he has searched every day to no avail. As the months have gone by, he has become less and less picky. These days, he eagerly applies for jobs that pay half of his former $100,000 salary. But he said his past earnings and his age are working against him.

“There’s this assumption that this job is beneath you because the salary is so much lower; therefore either you’re not going to work hard or you’re going to bolt as soon as something better comes along,” he said. “The only problem is, what’s out there that’s coming along?”

After his previous layoffs, Baldigo started socking away money for potential hard times. And he is collecting the maximum $405 per week unemployment insurance until the end of this year. At this point, he said, he and his wife, Susan, who works a part-time job at a preschool program while home-schooling their three children, should be able to last another year without dipping into their retirement savings.

In order to do that, though, they have cut back on travel, entertainment and other things they used to accept as a typical middle-class lifestyle. Their trips to Wegmans are carefully budgeted now — more store brands and no more cookies or soda. “We’re just drinking water now, you know what I mean?” he said.

Last Christmas, family members gave them gift cards to their favorite restaurants. They used the last one in September to celebrate their wedding anniversary. And Baldigo, who said he is leery of “socialized medicine,” acknowledged that the family would be in a much deeper fix without the help of Child Health Plus, the state’s health insurance program.

He said he gets frustrated when he goes to job fairs and finds people still clinging to the idea that they will find a job by putting on a suit and knocking on the doors of the big companies. It doesn’t work that way anymore. “I think the vast majority of those jobs that have gone away are not coming back,” he said.

He is convinced his breakthrough will come through networking, not sending out blind resumes. “I’m talking to everybody and anybody I know, and quite frankly some people I don’t know,” he said. “You can’t let pride stand in your way, because you’re never going to find a job if you do.”

A crossroads

Lamar Williams, of Clay, has only been out of work for 3 and one half months — but it’s the longest he’s been without a job in 30 years.

Williams, who will be 49 next month, started working at a series of jobs after graduating from Henninger High School in 1981. For seven years in the ’90s, he worked as a mill hand at Crucible Steel, a job he described as dirty, dangerous and low-paying. Then, in 1999, he landed a job at New Process Gear, first on the weekends and then full time.

It was the best job he ever had, even though he was never able to work himself high enough on the seniority ladder to get onto the day shift. Mostly, he worked the assembly line on the third shift, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. It was hard, he said, but it allowed him to have dinner with his family, put his kids to bed and be back in time to see them off to school.

The money he earned — he pulled in $80,000 during his best year, at $31 an hour plus overtime — allowed him to live the American dream, buying a nice house in the suburbs and sending his four children to good schools. Then Magna International took over New Process Gear, demanded concessions from workers and finally announced it would close the plant. Williams was laid off at the end of July.

He said his initial bitterness has faded, replaced by a nagging apprehension about what comes next. He knows traditional manufacturing jobs have mostly left Central New York and he will likely have to try something new. “It’s like a crossroads; I don’t know what to get into,” he said. “I know I won’t make the money I made.”

While he looks for work, he is taking computer courses at CNY Works, the job-search and training program in downtown Syracuse. His wife, Lisa, has two part-time jobs, but the family is without health insurance as it applies for Child Health Plus.

Like Baldigo, he said he has some money saved, but it will only last so long.

“I’ve got to stay positive for my wife and my family, because this is what I work for, and I’ll do anything to keep that,” he said. “I’ve worked two jobs before. I’ll take those jobs that people say, ‘Ah, I would never work for 10 bucks an hour.’ If I have to, I will.”

The new unemployables

That willingness to accept a lower wage is increasingly common among the unemployed, but it is particularly strong in older workers. A study — called “The New Unemployables” — by the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College found that 77 percent of workers age 55 and older said they were willing to take a pay cut, compared with 64 percent of those younger than 55.

But another study, completed in September by Rutgers University, found a growing fatalism among both employed and unemployed people. Ninety-five percent said they believe workers will have to take jobs below their skill level for the foreseeable future. The same percentage believe it will be many years before older workers will be able to retire when they want.

Among older unemployed workers, suspicions of age discrimination are never far from the surface. People from their late 40s onward are likely to believe that their age is a principal factor in their inability to land a job, according to the Sloan Center study.

Jeff Baldigo said no prospective employer has ever raised the issue with him. But he believes his age, combined with his previous level of earnings, are the main reasons most employers won’t consider him. “It’s sad that by using that kind of screening process they are absolutely and without a doubt leaving off thousands of candidates that are fantastic people,” he said. “They will never know who they passed by.”

Joe Szlosek, a partner at JAS Recruitment, in Liverpool, agreed that many companies are less willing to hire people who have been highly paid in their previous jobs — and many of those people are older. In addition, he said, a larger percentage of older people are blue-collar workers, and those kinds of jobs are getting harder and harder to find.

But Szlosek said many unemployed workers make the mistake of taking time off before starting their job search, then begin looking for the perfect job. By the time they adjust their standards to something more realistic, they have been out of work for months, making them less marketable than when they were first laid off.

In addition, the Sloan Center study said, some older workers who haven’t had to look for jobs in years aren’t using all the search tools available to them. They tend to rely more on newspaper classifieds and word of mouth and less on social networking than younger workers.

Lower expectations

Keith Chatterton said he has done everything he can to find something, including joining LinkedIn, the online networking site. But after three years, he acknowledged, he is “beyond discouraged.” He has widened his search to include jobs such as security guard and light-truck driving, but he still has no solid leads.

He brings in some money through his work as a Pop Warner football referee, and he has branched out to officiating other sports, such as high school field hockey and women’s lacrosse.

But his hopes of resuming any kind of sustainable career are fading. He has his sights set on his 62nd birthday in April, when he will probably opt to begin collecting Social Security, even though the reduced early payments will further erode his retirement. With five years left on his mortgage, he said, he doesn’t have much choice.

He said he isn’t bitter as he contemplates the larger economic forces that have put him where he is. “Most of these corporations are still making good money,” he said. “They’re still making huge bucks and having it (their product) made wherever it’s the cheapest. If I were in their shoes, hell, I’d probably be doing the same thing. It’s just the nature of the economy and business right now.”

He does admit he’s going a little stir-crazy without a job. He has painted his garage and just about every room in his house. He goes to the gym three times a week, partly just to get out of the house.

“I’ve been a little depressed, I won’t try to kid you there,” he said. “I walk the dog every morning, I see people going off to work. ‘Hi, Keith, how you doing? There’s Keith again,’ you know? But you hang in there.”